It's clear enough in retrospect that Anand should have done x,y and z, but one has to acknowledge that he really was up against it. He has been in very ordinary form for quite a while, and was playing a much stronger and younger opponent. 

Anand's been a creditable champion, but if you look back over his reign, how many times has he simply outplayed opponents from a complex position, or nursed a miniscule endgame edge? If you look, most of his victories have occurred when he's sprung a strong novelty, exploited his preparation advantage and then taken it home. Carlsen was never going to allow that sort of thing, so what was Anand to do? He can't reinvent himself after twenty years at the top level.  The idea that, in his forties, he's suddenly going to train really hard and improve markedly in x type of positions seems more than silly.

Maybe he did a lot of training hoping to catch up to Carlsen's level in dry and "simple" positions. If you manage to neutralize your opponent's greatest strength, that can be very demoralizing for him. And if it worked, it could conceivably have forced Carlsen to play more critical, aggressive stuff, perhaps to try to avoid the randomness of rapid and even blitz playoffs. Sounds like a tall order though.

In the end the reverse happened; Anand was weaker than Carlsen even in the few games that reached complicated positions. And with that balance of strengths, and especially some of Anand's "stupid" mistakes, talk of match strategy becomes a moot point. With the form he was in, Anand din't stand much chance whichever strategy he chose. As he said earlier, for him the match would be all about "execution" rather than strategy per se.

http://www.chessvibes.com/vishy-anand-it-teaches-you-some-humility

I found this Q&A from Anand slightly baffling:

"Would it be fair to say Vishy that in hindsight, had you adopted a more attacking approach from the very beginning, I mean you've been a veteran of many battles, would you too cautious against Carlsen, were you too defensive, did home pressure, as some are saying, get to you?

Well, this is the one criticism that I feel really misses the mark. Because I was of course delighted to get any aggressive position, but people have to understand Magnus Carlsen, the one thing he specializes in, is getting the position he likes, which is the driest dust, if you like slightly boring, technical positions. And he's very good at it, I mean the last game, I played a dynamic opening, he simply refused to let me have it. In every line he always steers the coast and that's what I meant, my game plan had to some how force him into an aggressive area. I thought I could do this by neutralizing, I mean by making dry positions less enjoyable for him than he would have liked but I didn't succeed and I think that's where my strategy failed."

I'm not sure if I understand Anand's logic here: Vishy's strategy was to enter positions he didn't like and Carlsen likes, in order to make Carlsen like those positions less??   

Perhaps in order to have an informed opinion we'd need to know more about what Anand's preparation was. Carlsen played quite a rare plan in game seven. Maybe he dodged a bullet; possibly Anand had an idea he wanted to try in another line. It's a bit simple to say, oh, another Berlin draw, we knew it. If Anand knew he'd get a Nimzo, maybe he'd have gone with that, but he didn't, of course. If he'd run into the Lasker or a solid defence to the Catalan and Carlsen had made an easy draw, maybe we'd have been saying that had been the wrong approach. Maybe he thought he had more and better ideas in the Berlin - hell, he must have some ideas; this must have been the main area of his prep if he was going to play 1 e4 most of the match - and he just didn't get lucky and manage to show them?

And maybe, whatever we think from the sidelines, he just knew he needed to settle down? If that's the case, perhaps it's just no use saying he had to go for it. Sometimes you just don't have the strength and it's better to fight another day.

Do I think 2 f4 would have been better? Not without a huge amount of work, and even then I suspect the move is close to losing at this level. If he wanted to do something along those lines I'd have thought the Evans would be better. Personally I thought a Scotch might have been worth a try.

Of course the Berlin and Marshall are huge problems for 1 e4 players, but what can you do? 

I don't have any plans for a second edition of my book - I'm presently doing something else - but maybe I and/or Quality should think about it. They may have someone else lined up in their GM Repertoire series for all I know, though.

I think what we've been talking about is an example of how Anand's strategy for the match was not right.  He seemed to want to beat Carlsen at his own game just to prove that he could, rather then try to aim for positions that suited his style of play better.  And when it became clear it wasn't working he was too slow to try a different approach.

It seemed clear to pretty much everyone before the match that the way he was going to beat Carlsen was with sharp opening preparation and tactical battles of calculation.  

Is it possible that having Leko as a second may have steered his opening preparation in the wrong direction, as even though he is renowned for his preparation, maybe it just wasn't suited to Anand's style of play, and helped to prevent him getting the kind of positions he needed?

IMJohnCox wrote on 11/27/13 at 18:11:34:

In the postmortem of my most recent game, my opponent a Lithuanian grandmaster said exactly that the Berlin is a big problem at the highest levels for 1.e4 players. Further he also stated that besides the Berlin there is the Marshall which seems unbeatable today but for that we have the d3 systems which still provide enough food for a real fight. He was very happy to see that I was sticking to my Chigorindefense (http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1262268387/8#8) and beat me handily with a  tricky off beaten setup which I had no experience with.

By the way, I wonder if IMJohnCox has any plans to write a sequel to his excellent Berlin book...
it will sell like hotcakes after this match!